The Perfect Storm – Enterprise Training Function Under Siege

The enterprise training function is under threat. If you are a corporate training professional catering to the training needs of employees through classrooms, online webinars, and eLearning, your world has completely changed in the last 10 years or so. Here are some reasons.

Bottom of the Pyramid

The training department has faced a chronic erosion in “authority” and decision-making power. Training budgets get cut when the economy goes south while logic tells you it should be the other way around! Read what I had to say about this issue here.

Looming Skill Gap

There is a tremendous skill gap that will hurt companies in the future if they don’t act now. Training departments are way too bogged down in training employees and don’t have the bandwidth or the mandate to cultivate skills in the market to create a readily employable workforce. The Open Education Alliance from Udacity is an initiative created to address skill gaps in the technology industry and this barely has a handful of companies participating.

Silos and Fiefdoms

Decentralized decision-making has its advantages. But when done not orchestrated properly, decentralized training development and delivery creates a big headache. Most often than not, training is decentralized in large corporations. This comes about because of the sheer size and diversity of the various businesses within the organization across geographies. In summary, training departments start small, but eventually the wheels come off as the organization grows. The end result is lots of training silos and fiefdoms with their own tools, processes, and even vendors.

Are you ready to tackle these challenges?

I will be presenting a webinar on the topic of Scaling eLearning Content Development on 30th April 2014 at 1 pm EST. I hope to share some of the best practices to overcome these challenges. To register for the webinar, click here. I will also post the webinar recording. Stay tuned.